Coyote Blog

On the road this week in Southern California.

For years I have used Adobe Premier Elements v. 3.0 to edit my videos because it worked OK and probably more importantly came in a package with Adobe Photoshop Elements (which is a very good tool, except for the organizer which I don't like).  But I have a PC with a 64-bit operating system and a quad core CPU for which this older software is not optimized -- the old 3.0 was running painfully slowly even on my new computer.   So I downloaded a trial edition of Premier Elements 7 and was horrified at how buggy and unstable it was, without adding any real functionality that I wanted over the old 3.0 edition.  So I then downloaded the brand new v 8.0 and found it if anything even worse.  In retrospect, I could have seen this in the reviews for both products on Amazon.

I have a general rule of thumb that one bad version generation happens, but two in a row means it is time for a change  (the exception to this being Quickbooks, which has had about 4 versions in a row where each is worse than the last, but there is really not a good alternative for me right now).

For video editing, I eventually landed on the oddly named Sony Vegas Movie Studio, v9.0.  I am extremely happy.  It works a lot like Elements used to but is rock solid stable.  I have been working with a 90-minute HD video for 2 days straight without a reboot and it has had no problems and is fast and has all the functionality I could want.  Not for casual applications probably, but I really like it.  I don't usually write posts like this, but this piece of software almost never makes it into the magazine reviews or comparisons at sites like PC Magazine or CNET.  Not sure why, but its an excellent program.  Thanks to the Amazon community, whose reviews again helped me make a good decision.

Postscript: I have never been wildly impressed with Adobe programming and their most recent iteration of Photoshop Elements really worries me as the organizer seems to be badly bugged.  Their programs have always been pigs -- the only way they could get a tolerable load time for Elements was to break the program into four parts and start up with a menu that lets one choose one part or the other.   I know they did this to fight the classic Adobe load time problem (used to have it in spades with Acrobat reader) but I think they have broken something in the process.    You know Adobe programs are a pig when I get impatient for them to load from the new Intel SSD, which generally serves up programs lightening fast.

Olson has a series of posts on the new FTC rules.  They are here and here.

The scariest part for me is not just the rules, but the frank admission that they will be enforced unequally as the FTC says it will apply discretion as to who to prosecute for picayune violations and who they won't.  As I often say to folks, even if you trust this administration   (e.g. "your guys") to not abuse this power, what about the next administration (ie "the other guys")?

Olson has a priceless picture a medical blogger snapped at a recent trade show showing that there is reason to fear that rules aimed at ridiculously small conflicts of interest will be enforced even when they are dumb:

Anyone who has been involved in NCAA recruiting can tell you the absurd results that flow from defining even tiny freebies as violations.  For example, when I interview high school students for Princeton, I have to be careful not to buy them lunch or coffee on the off-chance they turn out to be athletes where such a purchase could trigger a recruiting violation.

I suppose it is difficult maintaining a platform like eBay in a world of ever more sophisticated security intrusions.  But last night eBay went over the line, at least for me, making the platform so secure that I could not use my account.

We have an enormous pile of stuff we have tagged to sell on eBay, but just have not done it yet.  Yesterday, I convinced my son to do all the selling work on eBay in exchange for a revenue split.  As we sat down on his computer to sell the first item together so he could learn the process, eBay refused to let me use my account because I was on a computer it did not recognize or had not used before  (we'll forget for now the basic creepiness of eBay tracking me well enough to know I was on a new computer it had not seen me on before).

It turns out the whole confirmation process is keyed to the phone number I put in when I started the account.  The problem is that I was an eBay early adopter.  I have had an account for at least 12 years.  In trying to remember the phone number, it was probably not my home number.  That made it either a work number from 4-5 jobs ago or else a fake (remember, in 1997 eBay was just another little startup -- I may well have given it a fake phone number).

Anyway, the first verification process involved a phone call.  Whoever owns that phone right now is probably pretty confused.  The second involved an online chat.  I verified my name and account user name and address and all kind of other details, but apparently we just could not get past the agent's need for me to verify my 12 year old phone number.  She started trying to give me hints - like the area code and the last digit.  I told her that unless she gave me all 10 digits, we weren't going to get there.

We never did get the account opened on my son's laptop, he never did learn how to use eBay, and I guess I will still have a big pile of unsold stuff in my garage building up.  At some point I will find a computer eBay recognizes and I guess put in a better phone number, but all momentum with my teenage son is lost  (you know how that goes).

Update: So I did the logical thing, I found a computer that eBay would let me use with my account and changed my phone number in the account page to my new number.  Unfortunately, when I went back through the account verification process back on my son's laptop, they still wanted me to be able to come up with the old phone number (that number was x-ed out in the account page so I couldn't just look it up).  Somehow they have come up with a process that appears to be keyed to the phone number you used when you created the account, fine for relatively new users but a broken process for some of us with 12-year-old accounts.  Eventually, by the way, after about 30 minutes I was able to come up with some piece of information that they accepted and I got access to eBay on that computer.

I love Google Reader, but over the last several days have had problems with hundreds, or even thousands of old, already read posts suddenly being marked "unread."  Anyone else having this problem?

XKCD

Having the dreaded WordPress WP-Cron bad behavior with my server resources, causing my host to be less than amused.  Working on it....

In Lucifer's Hammer, one Astronaut up in space observed that you couldn't see international borders up there.  The other astronaut told him to shut up -- if he kept making such a big deal about it, countries would all paint two mile wide stripes in flourescent orange around their countries.

I thought of that when I saw this - corporate branding meets Google Earth.  Hat tip Virtual Globetrotting

View Larger Map

XKCD

Sorry to feed readers for all the spam test posts yesterday.  I thought I was catching them before they hit the RSS feed, but I was obviously wrong.  I did finally figure out how to make email and email picture posts work.

I just got an invited to join Google Voice.  This is a really awesome looking service.  In about 5 minutes I had a phone number in my area code picked out that would be my one number.  I then added phones I had that I wanted this number to ring.  The account gives me web access to voice mail (both a sound file and a written transcript) and text messages.  It also gives me free long distance calling any where in the US, all for $0 a month.  Lots of other features like customized greetings and call forwarding that depends on the caller which I have not played with yet.  Pretty cool.  If you get an invite, I would grab your number.

The hamster who powers my server apparently fell off his treadmill and the server went down for a while today.  Those most affected were probably folks who were trying to comment, as most of the time the blog could read from the server but not write.  Hopefull things are fixed now.

I have been a frequent detractor of Windows Vista.  However, after playing around with the Windows 7 beta for a while, I am very encouraged about this new OS.    For a limited time, Microsoft is offering pre-order sales of Windows 7 home and pro upgrade packages (these require you to already have Windows on your computer).  Prices are $49.99 and $99.99 respectively, which represent a 50% discount to the planned prices of these products at roll-out.  I already bought 3 copies from Amazon  (that is the limit, apparently, that Amazon is setting).  Delivery is not until some time in October.

Amazon links:  Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade and Windows 7 Professional Upgrade.

I am on vacation with my family.  We went to my 25th reunion at Princeton last week, and are now spending some tourist time in Washington DC.  Be back soon.

Get all the information and download links here.  I am going to try this on my extra PC this weekend.

I had to wait until TJIC left, but I joined Facebook today mainly so I can better monitor my kid's page.  The deal was that he could have a Facebook account but only if he accepted my wife and I as friends and we had access to his pages.

Having gotten an account, I am having nearly as much trouble trying to figure out what I can usefully do with it as I had when I signed up for a Twitter account (dropped within a week) over  a year ago.  Anyone who has ideas of how it might be useful (given that I am not in a business that runs on contact or relationship management) is welcome to send me those ideas.  Also, all you Facebook cultists are welcome to send me "friend" invites.  The least I can do is humiliate my kids by dwarfing their friends lists.   The email on my account is the same as for this blog, which you can get by mousing over the contact button on the top bar of this site.

Via Engadget:

Looks like the rumor of a new larger Kindle is true. Amazon just sent us an invitation to a press conference scheduled for Wednesday, May 6 at 10:30am ET. You know what Amazon does at press events? It launches new Kindles!

As noted by Peter Kafka over at All Things Digital, the location of the Amazon event -- Pace University -- is the historic, 19th century HQ to the New York Times which is said to be partnering with Amazon on the larger Kindle. That makes for a perfect symbolic bridge from old to new media. We'll have to wait and see if newspaper subscribers can be lured across.

I was an early Kindle adopter and love my Kindle 2.  My only complaint is the lack of electronic versions of a lot of older books I would like to read (example -- various James Clavell novels) but I am hoping this is similar to the early phase of CD's and DVD's when publishers had not yet seen the market or had the time to convert older music and movies to the new media.

Most of my readers know that I have been a Vista hater  (I still am by the way -- I have one machine running Vista SP1 and it drives me crazy -- just last night I had to reboot three times, each time just to be able to clear some permission state that would not let me delete a file).

The early returns look good for Windows 7, particularly for those of us looking for a home media sharing platform (the only reason I use Vista at all is because I have been toying around with Vista Media Center and a media extender, but more on that in a future post).  Here is Engadget:

The mood at Microsoft seems (understandably) high about this release. It's clear that lots of folks see this as the big, shiny band-aid for many of the Vista woes that people have been experiencing -- and in many ways, that's exactly what it is. If you're at all curious about what Microsoft has been up to, you should absolutely grab this install and take it for a spin (when you can); there is a metric ton going on here, and it's certainly worth taking a second look at. Bottom line, though? This is still Windows, and it's still got a lot of Vista in it. If you weren't feeling it the first time around, there may not be enough here to convince you otherwise. However, this is a valiant effort from Microsoft and it shows that the company does understand it's burned some bridges throughout the last three years -- this is a big step for them both in technique and tone, and that's certainly not lost on us.

Several people have said they have had difficulties with comments.  I don't know if it is a real problem, or if it is just that I was gone on Sunday and a bunch of stuff piled up in the moderation queue  (any comment with multiple links goes to a moderation hold for me manually to check for spam).  I will look in to things.

Update: Several comments on the post about police and photography creepily were sent straight past moderation into spam.  I have recovered them.

Thanks to a reader who pointed out to me that this post on Obama's economic policy and Mussolini-style fascism went poof.  I have no idea why, but if anyone else notices similar behavior, please drop me an email.  I have never deleted an old post, even when I have been later embarrassed by what I wrote, so posts should not disappear.

The post is back up, thanks to the Google cache, but some comments may have been  lost.  Sorry.

A while back on my other blog, Climate Skeptic, I wrote vis a vis my policy not to moderate the comments except for outright spam (which is also my same policy on this blog):

It might have been that 10 years ago or even 5 that visitors would be surprised and shocked by the actions of certain trolls on the site.  But I would expect that anyone, by now, who spends time in blog comment sections knows the drill "” that blog comments can be a free-for-all and some folks just haven't learned how to maturely operate in an anonymous environment....

In fact, I find that the only danger in my wide open policy is the media.  For you see, the only exception to my statement above, the only group on the whole planet that seems not to have gotten the message that comment threads don't necessarily reflect the opinions of the domain operator, is the mainstream media.  I don't know if this is incompetence or willful, but they still write stories predicated on some blog comment being reflective of the blog's host.

Well, I was wrong.  It appears that even in 2009, people who should know better about how blogs work are trying to tar blog proprietors with their commenters actions.  I would put Klein in the "should know better" category, though as a MSM guy as well he may fall into my one exception.  Which would mean I wasn't wrong after all.  It's like that old joke:  I was wrong once ... I once thought I had made a mistake, but it turned out I didn't.

Demonstration of Microsoft Photosynth technology using an collection of inauguration photos.  The arrows at the bottom take you to other mosaics.  Move the cursor over the picture, it white quadrilaterals will appear - these are photo views you will get if you click on it.  Kind of cool -- you could imagine this in a movie, with police hunting for the killer in a large public even, searching through photos, yada yada.

Doogie Horner creates a classification system for heavy metal band names that pretty awesome (click to enlarge).

I saw it first at FlowingData, a website and blog about the graphical representation of data that I can't believe I have never visited before.  Other cool graphics include the Walmart growth video.  Lots of ways to waste time on this site, if you are a geek like me.

At first I thought the picture here was pretty lame - big deal.  Composition, not great.  Detail, blah.  But then I started zooming in.  And in.  All the way to the point I could almost play the music from the sheet music of the band in the lower center of the picture.

A few days ago I posted on the security hole I discovered in Paypal where payments to my email were flowing to someone else's account.  After denying the problem for quite a while, Paypal finally admitted it.

In the last two days, I have had two other problems with Paypal.  The first was that an account hold was slapped by Paypal on my account.  Apparently I accessed the account from an IP address (maybe a hotel on the road?) they had never seen me at before and so they froze my account until this morning when I had to spend an hour convincing them in various ways I really did control the account.

The second issue was when Paypal put a hold on a payment I received.  At first, I was ticked off at the buyer, thinking that person had received the item and then was trying to keep his money.  But it turned out the buyer had nothing to do with it.  Again, the Paypal computers saw the buyer account had been relatively inactive and held the payment until the buyer called in and convinced them the payment was legitimate.

Now, at some level, one can say that Paypal is trying to protect my money.  But if fraud is so prevelent in Paypal that these kind of onerous fraud checks and constant account and payment freezes are becoming the norm, then it may well be that their business model is in trouble.  Like strip searches at the airport, it may increase security but it may also kill the business.

If you had asked me five years ago, I would have said it likely that by 2009, we would have an online payments system that involved some type of digital certificates on individual computers tied to either a payment system or one's credit card number.  My corporate cash management account works this way, but the retail world does not.  Part of the problem is that there is only limited consumer incentive to demand such a system.  Currently, most fraud costs are pushed by card companies unto retailers rather than consumers (who can fairly easily void a fraudulent payment) reducing the percieved cost of low security.

Postscript:  It is always interesting to listen to the tone of customer service agents.  I talked to four different Paypal agents this morning, and the fairly clear undertone of their responses to my rants about these problems was "it's as bad around here as you think it is."